Anyone know of a modern lightweight object for displaying text vertically?

dhjdhjdhj's icon

I'd like to be able to label the columns of a matrixctrl. The objects I found so far are either really old (compressed with 'sit') or require jsui or other external support.

I'm wondering if anyone has built the equivalent of the [comment] object that rotates the text 90 degrees so it can be displayed like a book title?

David Butler's icon

I've implemented this functionality in a few UI objects I've written, been meaning to make a version which is text-only. Watch this space...

dhjdhjdhj's icon

Watching....

spectro's icon
Max Patch
Copy patch and select New From Clipboard in Max.

Comment?

spectro's icon
Max Patch
Copy patch and select New From Clipboard in Max.

Or getting the same result - the lazy typists way…

dhjdhjdhj's icon

I didn't realize (although I probably should have) that I could insert line terminators between each character. It took me a few moments to figure out CMD-RETURN was the way to do this.

As it happens, the "lazy typists" way suits me better because the actual text to be displayed will depend on what plugin/patch has been loaded in the column.

These will be terrific in the short term, however I really want to have the individual characters rotated by 90 degrees so that the comment can be read like a book title written on the spine.

dhjdhjdhj's icon

Cute use of [thresh], by the way.

Roman Thilenius's icon

define "light weigth".

if you have jitter, you can use jit.lcd, jit.rota, and jit-pwindow (with onscreen off) to easily display text (read: fonts) in any position and combination you want.

dhjdhjdhj's icon

Light weight ---- small object (RAM usage, processing usage). I'll end up with hundreds of these things and so I'd like them to load really fast and not have "extra" stuff. I don't know very much about the jitter stuff but it seems to me that loading lots of jit.lcd objects is a much more expensive proposition.

Basically, I just want [comment] with 90 degree text. I'll build an external myself to do this if I have to, it's not too hard, just didn't want to do that if someone had already done it.

Roman Thilenius's icon

in the moment lcd or something jitter is created it sucks CPU like stupid, but the displaying of it should not cause more trouble than e.g. displaying an image file.

but i must confess that i probably have a very creative definition of "leightweight" when i suggest you to write a little video app to replace the comment object. :)

otoh, it seems still as easy as writing a custom object in c++.

plus you get more flexibility. using jit.lcd will allow you to use copymodes or blur effect or skip the text a bit so that it is 80° ... things like that re two minutes work on the patch layer, but almost impossible using c++.

Rick's icon
dhjdhjdhj's icon

That's an excellent idea --- I got hold of a couple of font manager tools to play with, rotating an existing font by 90 degrees seems to do the trick

Cool